The Gift of Thanks by Margaret Visser

Author:Margaret Visser [Visser, Margaret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

In modern times we have war memorials to honour those fallen in battle. But in the context of our very different society, such monuments are liable to elicit reactions quite dissimilar from the admiration offered to the splendour of Achilles. In Britain for example, monuments raised after the First World War remember ordinary soldiers, not men of "renown"; they refer to "everyman" killed in battle.21 The ideal figures depicted on war memorials were taken to be those who had volunteered to fight, those who first responded to the call to arms, and who, as it turned out, died in the greatest numbers. The act of having freely chosen to enlist made gratitude to them a natural response. These young men (and women, because for the first time in history ordinary non-combatants, including women, were commemorated by war memorials) were understood to have died saving their country from even worse horrors than the war had spawned. People felt, and were encouraged to feel, that it was incumbent on the survivors to ensure that these sacrifices, these gifts of their lives, had not been offered in vain.22

But the latter half of the twentieth century has taught us a very different attitude to war: we are capable far more easily of regarding the lives of our war dead as pitifully wasted. We feel horrified at their loss, and guilty. In the Second World War there was conscription; the huge numbers of soldiers were not a professional fighting class and were not, on the whole, volunteers. Non-combatant citizens—people like ourselves—died as horribly as soldiers did and in even greater numbers. Gratitude is a response to the behaviour of others, not ourselves.

More recently, we have taken to erecting walls of names of the dead—all of them grouped together and not only those from a specific town. (It was after the First World War that it became common practice to list alphabetically on local war memorials the names of all soldiers who had died. Meanwhile the people who erected the monuments, who in the past always expected to be named on them, began to receive no mention; artists signed their work discreetly or not at all.) We feel that we owe it to the dead that they should not remain anonymous, that we should pay personal attention to each one of them, regardless of class or rank. Here we might locate an element of gratitude, although we often say we are grateful for the lives of the fallen rather than for their deaths; gratitude is always an intensely specific and personal matter. A relatively new practice is to recite all the names of the dead—both combatant and non-combatant victims, from all over—aloud, one name after the other, the very time needed to say all the names being a reminder of the extent of our loss. Reading the names unites the living in sympathy. The idealists among us try to feel too that we can most appropriately "give something back" to the dead by preventing war in the future, that in this way we can try to give meaning to these otherwise senseless deaths.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.